I've never admired anyone who insisted his birthday was big deal.
In a Nutshell
The core message is that maturity means making deliberate trades among life's 10 priorities—community, romance, parenting, family, recreation, friends, career, physical health, spiritual health, and personal growth—because time is zero-sum and you can only pick your regrets or have them picked for you. The most important takeaways are that options only have value when exercised, the goal of adulthood is commitment not optionality, and checking multiple priorities with single actions while ruthlessly eliminating lower-value alternatives is the only way to avoid living an average, unfocused life.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Today is a not so special day, but it is the day that the speaker was born. The speaker tried to get a horizontal setup to work but failed miserably and acknowledges that sometimes things get fucked up.
The tweet that has pissed everyone off states: "Your level of maturity is inversely correlated with how much you want other people to see celebrate your birthday. I've never admired anyone who insisted his birthday was a big deal."
The speaker clarifies that celebrating other people's birthdays and honoring people for being alive is absolutely fine. The difference is when you demand everyone do it for you. This is where entitlement goes in the wrong direction - things like "this is my birth week" and "this is my birth month."
One team member texted: "Today's the day Genghis Khan died and you were born" with a quote from the Khan: "There is no good in anything until it is finished."
The speaker loves this message about starting what you finish.
The speaker shares deeper thoughts: When you hit whatever deadlines you have, stand tall, don't crack, endure. You can die tomorrow. Today, you do the only thing you can do. You fight, you rage on, you do what you came to do. You finish what you started no matter how much it costs, how long it takes, or how much it hurts, because you said you would.
Being cringed is the tax you pay when you start to prove to the world that you care more about what you want than how you look.
One thing no one tells you about delayed gratification: once you learn how to do it, you keep doing it until you die. And then what you delayed never happens.
Your goals become easier to accomplish when you become harder to distract.
Whenever you get worried about not achieving your goals, just remember, there's plenty of room at the top because the majority of people are just whiny, overweight, in debt, little bitches. You'll blow past them so fast it'll look like they're standing still because they are.
Be more dangerous than the forces that hope to destroy you. Make reality your bitch day. If you do not have courage, nothing else matters.
The goal of youth is optionality and the goal of adulthood is commitment. These two things are at odds. At some point, you have to reconcile which one you are. Are you still stuck to your youth or have you decided to become an adult?
An adult means you eliminate alternatives. You walk through one-way doors where you know you can't walk back. It's difficult to undo a marriage. It's difficult to impossible to undo a child. There are some one-way doors.
A lot of the best things in life come on the other side of commitments. Society overemphasizes the value of optionality.
If you delay gratification, optionality in a lot of ways is delaying gratification. It's the idea that "I'll keep my options open." But options only have value when they are exercised. Until you exercise them, they are valueless. It's like dying at the end of your life as an ant that put a big pile of crumbs that you never ate.
At some point you have to pull the trigger. You have to make the call. You have to make the decision. You have to cut off one future.
When you make that decision, it means that you're going to decide that one thing is more important than another, which means that you also open yourself up for criticism.
Priority only recently in English vernacular was ever even used in the plural until about 1950. It was only priority. There's only one because only one thing can come first.
Here are 10 things that most people say are incredibly important:
- Community: giving back to your community
- Romance: marriage, your partner
- Parenting: for your children
- Family: to your siblings, to your parents, your cousins, et cetera
- Recreation: having fun, relaxing
- Friends: spending time, et cetera
- Career: your career aspirations, professional aspirations
- Physical health
- Spiritual health
- Personal growth
If you were to ask someone to prioritize these, they will have a different priority than the person next to them. If somebody looks at your list and it is different than theirs, they will call yours wrong because you do not live your life the way that they would prefer.
You don't have to live according to anyone else's preferences. You have to follow the law, but besides that, you're pretty much free to do whatever you want.
We are so shackled by the idea that other people don't like what we're doing. That's why they have their life to do what they want to do with.
You get to pick your regrets or they will be chosen for you.
Whenever you invest in any of those 10 things, you pull away from others. If you add an hour here, you take an hour from here. We have a zero-sum life when it comes to time.
You will live an imperfect life. Period. You cannot have a house by the mountains in isolation and then also be walking distance from restaurants and then also be on the beach and also be ski-in ski-out. It doesn't work. You can't have a rich neighborhood if you want to be in isolation.
All of these things are okay to want. It's just that they will not work. They are conflicting priorities.
Whenever you make a decision in your life, people will take the equal opposite extreme. People will do this to whatever decisions you made because they're too cowardly to make them themselves.
People are cowards. They walk around afraid. They don't want consequences. They don't want conflict because they think that other people's opinions about their lives matter more than their own.
You must make trades. You have to make a trade.
The definition of the word "decadere" from Latin means to cut off. It's just what future are we cutting off today.
Maturity level is directly related to the amount of commitments that you have made, the number of people who rely on you. If those commitments are the elimination of alternatives, it means that you've cashed in optionality. You've chosen to do things in lieu of others.
Even if you were to divide your life into 12 hours per day (assuming 4 hours for eating, showering, hygiene, all the living), and 12 hours are the hours you can just be focused, if you were to divide those 12 hours among the 10 things outlined, giving an hour and 10 minutes per day to each, you can't do it all. You have to make trades.
The tactical tip is to try to do things that check multiple boxes. For example, the reason that lifting with friends is so valuable is that the speaker lifts with people they work with who they're also friends with. It checks off recreation, a degree of career growth, and physical health. They get three or four boxes checked from this one activity.
You can block more time with it. There are probably some versions of that for you that you can do for two or three things. You can check a few boxes with one action, with no extra time.
You will do the best that you can to manage these things. At the end of your life, you will think to yourself, it would have been nice to do these other things. But when you say that, you do that from the position of having already earned the benefit of your existing trade.
What we want is the benefits of the trades that we did not make and the benefits of the ones that we did. We look at the benefits of a different priority being first and then saying, "It would be nice if I was also hyper-spiritual. It would also be nice if I was in the best shape. It would also be nice if I had the best marriage. It would also be nice if I was a great parent."
You can't trade everything in. You get to pick your regrets. You get to pick the things that you say were less important. Otherwise they will be chosen for you.
The speaker thinks to themselves, "I am the problem." We always want what we can't have. This is an inherently human trait. Single people want to be married. Married people want to be single. People with no kids want kids. People who have kids want a night off. Employees want to start their own business. Employers are jealous of how their employees can clock out and not take their work home with them.
There's countless examples of whatever you don't have is what you want, because everyone listening has accomplished things that they said would make them happy. There's something in your life right now that earlier on in your life, you said, "If I had this, I would be happy." And yet here we are.
The constant source of dissatisfaction is you. We want it all.
You go to a store where there's 10 amazing shoes and each shoe is $100 and you have $100 in your wallet. In order to justify our decision, we make everyone else feel bad about buying a different set of shoes than us when it was just a choice.
If you like the priorities that you have, you've already got it. You're there.
People get in trouble where they allow life to make those priorities for them. They don't get to make the choices. They sit passively by and let options expire.
You can be a master of your own life to a degree. If you can just say, "I'm willing to give up these other things for the things that I care about most."
Take those 10 things, rank them one to 10. Then of those, see which one you think is off. As in, "I said this is number two, but I don't think I'm really putting number two out of 10 effort into this."
Two examples for the speaker: They think they've been not as good of a husband as they probably should have been. They probably should have spent more time with Layla and they're going to prioritize doing that.
They have a higher desire for friendship than they have in their current life. They see friends sporadically outside of lifting, which is basically almost the entirety of the recreational friend time that they have.
They had a buddy who was there for their birthday, which was awesome, that Layla kind of surprised them with. Those are very filling to their soul.
They're going to make trades in the coming future where they're going to decrease some of these other stats in order to make some room where they think that the incremental return they'll get on losing an hour on career and adding an hour somewhere else will have a little bit less, but their overall life benefit will be higher.
The meta of this is the game that you want to play. There's a story about a founder on David Senra's podcast who said you always want to look for the most dominant game.
MySpace lost to Facebook because Facebook had a more dominant game that they were playing. MySpace wanted to get the most users. Facebook was optimizing around monthly active users (MAU), which then became kind of the social media norm in terms of what social platforms are measured by.
That one little misstep in terms of what metric they were optimizing around meant that Facebook was playing a superior game.
There are subset superset games. There are some games that even if you're just playing them, you beat everyone else because the game that you're optimizing for is just a superior game.
The 10 categories are: community, romance/partner, parenting for your kids, family (siblings and parents), recreation and rest and fun, friends, career, physical health, spiritual, and personal growth.
Some people make their entire game one of them. The larger game is trying to win at life and realizing that each of these are components of it.
People also have a hard time allowing other people to change because it just makes them intellectually more work. It's like "How dare you change your mind in front of me. How dare you be really into your physical health and then decide that your kids are more important and so you don't work out as much."
People get upset because they're weak. People are pets.
None of their opinions matter because the person who has the most context on you is you. You're the only one who has to live with you.
It's hard because when we're kids we're raised to listen to other people. Shame has a very good place in society. You should feel bad if you do things that hurt people. Those things work for enforcing social rules.
There's a very odd dichotomy between it's good to have other people on the outside telling you, "Hey maybe you shouldn't be a fuck-ass," but at the same time being able to differentiate between rule-breaking activity and law-breaking activity.
There are legal laws that have written out consequences that you have to abide by to live in whatever area you're in. But then there's rule-breaking that's spoken and unspoken. So many of you get different cultures, different rules, your parents have different rules.
It's realizing that there are no consequences or the consequences that happen from those rules are not nearly as severe as we think they are.
The reason the book "Offers" opens with only three words, which is "There are no rules" (that's four words), is because it's always a reminder to yourself of what rules am I being weighed down by right now that I'm choosing. What box am I living in that I'm unaware of that has invisible walls that is keeping me in.
Brian's family owns an aerospace parts manufacturing company. They did $30 million in revenue last year and want to grow it to $100 million. He's stuck in the middle of a family conflict. His parents co-own the business and one wants to sell it - they own 51% so they control the decision - while the other wants to keep it and grow. He grew up being told to never join the family business because of how much stress it puts on the relationship, but he joined anyway.
Now one parent won't teach him their side of operations so if they left he wouldn't know how to run that part of the company. He's asking how to convince his parents to keep the business and help scale it instead of selling it out from under him.
The answer is that from a moral perspective, his parents have earned the right to do whatever they want with their business. It's not his call.
From the self-serving side, the approach is: defining what you want to have happen, then asking the question "what would it take?" Then they get to name their price and that price can be worth it or not.
Oftentimes when you ask "what would it take," people assume you are unwilling to pay a price that they have not named. The speaker has gotten things in life that most people considered unreasonable because they determined a price that they thought was unreasonable but they were selling it from their own wallet of time, money, trade-offs, embarrassment, shame, guilt, whatever price they thought the speaker was unwilling to pay.
Start with: What do I want to have happen? Number two, what would it take? Number three, ask them what they want.
No one sells a company because they want to sell a company. Selling a company is incredibly painful. It's a very long process. There's lots of lawyers. It's not that fun. They're selling the company because of what they believe the benefit of selling the company is.
The idea would be: How can I help you get what you want without selling the company? There are a lot of different structures that you can do where you could buy it from them, you can get a lender, you could do an ESOP. If they want a liquidity event, maybe they just want their time back. There are a lot of other levers that you can use to help them get what they want.
The question is: What would it take for you to feel 10 out of 10 on all priorities?
The answer is that you can feel 10 out of 10 on the priorities if you know that they're not all priorities. When the speaker made their list, eight out of the ten they felt like they had appropriately checked boxes for.
Community is one and business is one for them, but when they do content like this, it helps more than one person. It helps a community, a digital community of entrepreneurs. They can't go to the corner and put a sign up saying "entrepreneurs" but they can do that on the internet. So they help their people, which matters a lot to them.
When feeling average, identify the single most important priority and be willing to sacrifice on the things that matter less. Many people remain average because they attempt all ten priorities simultaneously and never accomplish any of them fully. Not all ten priorities hold equal value, and giving them equal attention creates a less optimized life.
Experienced betrayal from friends who were thought to be supportive. Realized that the vast majority of people want others to do well, just not better than them. Fortunate to have a handful of friends known for the majority of life who genuinely celebrate wins without viewing the world as zero-sum or competitive in status terms.
Used to think friends needed to be as ambitious or successful as self, but realized there are multiple measures of friendship value including emotional support, cheering you on, being funny, and being someone to relax and decompress with. Has not been hard to cut off people who do not root for success, though the decision itself has been heartbreaking.
Luck is defined as the probability of a good thing happening, and if it happens with low percentage, it qualifies as good luck. Overcoming luck requires rolling the dice a large number of times. Rolling a 20-sided die once and getting a 20 is luck, but rolling it a hundred times and getting a 20 once may be called unlucky by some, yet the world only cares that the 20 was rolled. If only one really good thing needs to happen, unlimited attempts are possible with basic survival needs met.
Pregnancy was a surprise that changed everything. Two to three years of health issues and pregnancy taught that exerting will is possible but there exists an illusion of control. Not as much control exists as wished for. Things happen outside of control, discipline, or willpower. Recognition of when this occurs is key, relating strongly to the Serenity Prayer about having courage to change things that can be changed, patience to accept things that cannot, and wisdom to know the difference.
Simple approach of asking what the partner needs in terms of protection and provision.
Enjoys lifting weights and working out for a long time. Likes hanging out by the pool, enjoying nice views. Fitness and views are the most important non-work activities. Loves good television shows. Does many walks with partner, sometimes for hours, which creates the best conversations due to having just enough focus with no distractions and being present with each other.
Partner found through Bumble dating app. Partner was committed to doing one first date per week, going on dates consistently and moving on if not the right match. Volume negates luck in relationships. The quality of relationship with significant other has a 0.71 correlation with subjective well-being and happiness. Most people do not try very hard at relationships despite this high correlation. Going on more than five dates is worthwhile given this statistical relationship.
Not possible to know what true goals are because no objective measure exists. Multiple paths lead up the mountain, and all paths get to the top. One path might be faster or have more rocks, but all paths reach the destination. People delay decisions by sitting at the bottom of the mountain, believing they must pick the correct path when any path will work. Delaying decisions prevents hitting goals more than picking the wrong path.
Not possible to know true goals without attempting them. Goals are those aligned with values and the desired life. Too much introspection can be problematic. Learning occurs by attempting rather than reading or watching. Wanting something is confirmed by actually wanting it.
Start fixing the disconnect between how life is being lived and how it should be lived. Priorities change over time. Previously working more was acceptable before having a child on the way, but working less now makes sense. Do not regret past choices made when circumstances were different. The guilt felt is counterproductive and steals energy needed to move forward.
Does not take years to develop the skill of confronting hard tasks. Takes days or seconds. The anticipatory fear or anxiety about hard tasks or changes is an illusion created by the mind to maintain comfort. The brain is designed for survival, not success, and wants to keep a person safe. Most change only takes days. Things feared or avoided for years can become irrelevant after doing them three days in a row. Fear is a mile wide and an inch deep.
Would buy a ranch and take care of land. Need to have something to do even without business involvement.
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